10/05/2010

Born in the mountainous Yamagata as Takahashi Yukio 高橋行雄.Due to the work of his father, he spent his youth in Onomichi (Inland Sea), where he began to write haiku, studying with Yamaguchi Seishi and Akimoto Fujio.He received many prices for his haiku collections.

During a month-long business trip to America in 1969, I wrote one hundred and seventeen haiku. I looked down on Central Park's verdure (336 hectares) from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building. Expressing it just as a miniature garden would be trite like a cheap picture postcard. From this height it looked like the parsley served on a dish in Western cuisine. I felt that this expression could convey my feeling. With the advance of internationalization, this verse was regarded as a groundbreaking example of haiku composed overseas by Japanese haikuists, but many people criticized it for that reason.

A small selection of these translations—fifteen poems—appeared previously in this journal , with a note introducing Takaha Shugyo as “one of Japan’s leading contemporary haiku poets.”Since then, some readers will have encountered his work in anthologies, and perhaps have anticipated the appearance of a full collection.

kurumi waru kurumi no naka ni tsukawanu heya

cracking open a walnut —inside the shell,one unused room

This is not a mystical revelation (like that received by the fourteenth-century English mystic Julian of Norwich, gazing in astonished wonder at a hazelnut resting in her palm), but something much more down-to-earth: a revelation of the ordinary. It is exactly the kind of revelation to which the haiku is peculiarly well suited, and which Shugyo is masterly at conveying.